Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is July 28th, 2015, and my guest is Rachel Loudon, visiting scholar and the Theresa Luzano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas,

and author of Quizzine and Empire, cooking in World History. Rachel, welcome to Econ Talk.

I'm delighted to be here.

We're going to talk about your book as well as an essay you've written on food and modernity.

Your books are rather extraordinary history of food. It's interaction with empire, nations, and culture,

and there's a lot to talk about there. I want to start with grain wheat, in particular, but other grains as well.

Why are grains so important in the history of food and why do they remain important?

Well, let's go back to the Paleolithic. Human beings, it's pretty clear. We're incredibly careful and intelligent about inventoring,

inventoring the world's food sources. They knew what was edible and what was not. They'd experimented and found out what was poisonous and what was not.

And the trick was to find something that was nutritious, that was storeable, that was transportable,

and most foodstuffs just don't live up to this. Most foodstuffs are available only episodically in the summer, in the harvest season,

or if they're big game, they're only available when you've got a big catch.

The really neat thing about grains is that they satisfy all those criteria. They're highly nutritious because they're food for young plants.

They are highly storeable because they are hard and dry and they don't rot and go bad.

And they're highly transportable because they have a high food value to weight ratio,

unlike, say potatoes, which are very wet and heavy and therefore are hard to store in transport.

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